Actually we only meant level and defense related damage modifiers but we're not going to tell you that because apparently not normalising the bar stats and gear perks is the way to go even though legendaries and exotics tend to have ridiculous groupings of those. Auto-shotguns, exotic fusion rifle with max impact but min charge time, exotic auto rifles with humongous groupings of rate of fire, impact, stability, range are all totally balanced. They 100% don't need normalisation oh no.
I don't even want to get into the BS of semantics that is having the impact stat being the base bullet damage (why? It sounds like a stat to do with actual you know, IMPACT as in knockback effect - which before someone told me what it actually did was backed up by the fact that my high impact hand cannon had good knockback/flinch so I assumed that was what it did) while Attack only for level and possibly defense differentials (I've never been sure how it works because it's not explained anywhere I could find...).
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I'm lvl 14 now and started pvp when I was lvl 11. I don't feel like level makes much difference to me. I have good games and bad although I did get loot on one of my bad games (bottom of the group) that I found funny as I had been reading about the fact that its totally random who gets what which in my opinion is very fair. We all try just as hard.